Double Chance Betting

Double chance betting is one of our articles in the series on football betting tips and strategies. But of course, this article will be handy for any sport offering double chance bets.

Here we’ll cover all the basics behind this bet type, and how you can
use it to your advantage. You’ll also learn the maths involved it
deriving your own double chance odds as well as having access to our
calculator that will do all the maths for you.

This article will cover

What does double chance mean?

How to convert match result odds into double chance odds

Double chance calculator

Betting strategies for double chance bets

Double chance bet explained

What is a double chance bet?

It is a single bet that lets you cover two of the three possible outcomes from the match result market. There are three possible combinations for double chance betting.

Home team or Draw – Written Double chance 1x

Draw or Away team – Written Double chance x2

Home team or Away team – Written double chance 12

How does double chance betting work

Double chance (DC) betting can be looked at in two different ways.
The most common way is using it as a combination of two outcomes as
described above. Normally used as a type of insurance for a punter that
isn’t overly confident in betting just one outcome.

Using it in this way, a DC bet works in exactly the same way as any other bet type. You can do a double chance accumulator, Lucky 15 or Yankee just as you could with match result. The only difference is you are now cheering on either of the two outcomes – as they both have the same payout.

The second way of looking at how double chance betting works is to think of it as a way to lay a selection (if you’re not familiar with what a lay bet is read our “types of bet” article). This mean you no longer have to only use betting exchanges to lay match result bets. A “Home team or Draw” bet is the same a laying the Away team. This will be covered in more detail in our strategy section.

How to calculate Double chance odds

To calculate double chance odds we’re going to assume you already
have the match results odds available, as these are needed to do the
conversion. Of course, I could just give you the formula, but this will
be of little use to most of you without an example. So let’s first look
at a real world example.

At the time of writing this article, the Manchester derby is only a
few days away, so let’s have a look at the odds for this game. We will
use the match result odds from bet365 and convert them to DC odds to see
which of the two markets are offering better value.

Before moving on, now is probably the best time to have a little look at
how a bookmakers’ book works. This might sound a little confusing to
someone who is relatively new to betting. But bear with me, as not only
will this knowledge help with all bet types, it’s also very easy once
you see an example.

Firstly, and most obviously, bookies aren’t charities. They are in
business to make money. And they do this my making sure the book
percentage is always in their favour. The book percentage is simply the
addition of the percentage chance each outcome has of happening. If this
percentage is greater than 100%, the bookie is running at a profitable
margin.

So how do you find the percentage chance of a particular outcome?
Percentage chance or implied probability is the inverse of the odds.
Don’t worry; this sounds a whole lot harder than it actually is. All you
do is divide 1 by the odds.

Doing this with the Manchester derby odds we get the following

As you can see, the book is running at over a hundred percent and is,
therefore, a good book for the bookmaker. But that’s not really
important for this article, what we need to take from that example is
the maths behind it. This is what will be used to convert the match
result odds, except we will just be doing it with two of the selections.

Let’s say we’re looking to do a win or draw double chance bet on the home team. What odds would we get if we combined the home and draw odds together? And will these odds be better than what is being offered in the double chance market?

Well, this doesn’t look like it helped, I hear you saying. How do you know if 0.86 is better or worse than 1.18. This is where our friend “inverse” comes into play again.

That is much better; this clearly shows that if we use bet365 for this game, it makes more sense to bet double chance than it does to combine the home and draw odds. But this isn’t always the case. In the section on double chance strategy, you will see how to use match result odds to your advantage.

Double Chance betting strategy

When placing a DC bet, you’re often better off using the match result
odds. Why? Because you don’t have to use match result odds from the
same bookie.

Let’s have a look at the same game, from our section on calculating
Double chance odds. Here are the best odds on offer from several
different bookmakers.

Doing the same calculation again, but this time with the best odds
available, you will see it now make sense to combine the match winner
odds. You’ll now get odds of 1.23 instead of the 1.18 on offer from
bet365.

A second strategy for using DC betting is to use this market as a Lay
bet. Most of the time, these odds will not be better than what is on
offer from the betting exchanges. Or at least for the big games. But
matches with little liquidity might not have competitive odds, and this
is when it will be better to look into DC odds.

With the big games, it might make sense to combine the match result market odds. Bookmakers now offer very competitive odds on the major games, especially for match result. And once you take into account Betfair’s or other betting exchanges commission, you’ll often find this method gives you that tiny little bit of extra value.

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